Silver Creek Shows How To Play the Iraqi Card

Electronic Gaming Business, May 7, 2003

Our own reviewer of industry trends, strategies and PR ploys is not known for appreciating marketing plans that exploit patriotic fervor. Given that the EGB Boss is kept chained in the bowels of PBI Media's remote office in Middle Earth, we don't know the entire backstory here. It has something to do with a traumatic childhood incident involving a USO road show, Bob Hope in drag and a run-in with a drug-addled Joey Heatherton.

Whatever. The Horned One truly spit fire when Sony tried to trademark "Shock and Awe," apparently for possible use in a future game based on the Iraqi Freedom campaign. Converting the recent war into interactive entertainment is not the crime, of course. The Boss believes deeply in every company's right to produce stupid topical titles that no one is going to buy.

No, the real rub here was trying to trademark a military catchphrase. That's when a corporate entity starts to seem more cloying than country singer Lee "I'm Proud to Be an American" Greenwood when he tries to make a comeback every time a U.S. Marine gets shipped overseas. Like every good multinational, Sony backed away from the error...minutes after being caught at it. Of course, press coverage failed to pursue the darker possibilities in this story.

Back in 2000, U.S. Customs officials and the FBI investigated reports that up to 4,000 PS2s were being shipped to Iraq from here, and (we couldn't make this up) some experts warned that the consoles' CPUs could be daisy-chained into a supercomputer. It's more likely that Saddam just had bad taste in games and wanted to play Portal Runner in every one of his secret bunkers. Maybe knowing that it had this 4,000 unit consumer base in Iraq, Sony was planning on marketing Shock and Awe there. Ya think?

Topicality Done Right

On the other end of the market spectrum, the Boss gives a laudatory grunt to humble little indie developer Silver Creek Entertainment (www.silvercrk.com) for giving us a lesson in how such topical tie-ins can be done tastefully. The venerable maker of the gorgeous Hardware Solitaire series issued a special edition of the game using that famous military-issue card deck of fugitive Iraqi leaders.

Far from a trashy attempt to cash in on war, Iraqi's Most Wanted Solitaire is a free game. Although Silver Creek is hoping users of the game will get turned on to the Hardwood Solitaire title, company spokesperson Jonas Stewart says the project was just a natural for a card game that issues new deck and card faces as a matter of course. "We don't require the download of Hardwood Solitaire III to play Iraqi's Most Wanted. We truly wanted it to be a free thing," he says.

Better than that, the game is illuminating, giving you the full card deck and the identities and titles of Saddam's henchmen. "Our first challenge was that the cards didn't translate well to the small screen," says Stewart. There was too much text on the real card backs to work in a solitaire game. Designers retooled HW's online help system so that mousing over a card face called up the Iraqi henchman's identity and official title.

What you have here, then, is a topical game that works as good PR because it satisfies a legitimate curiosity about these cards and it informs rather than exploits. One has to wonder if the major game publishers will appreciate these fundamentals of good PR when they try to ride the war's coattails in the coming months. "This is the beauty of being an indie," says Stewart, "if you think it up you can make it happen in a couple of days, something the behemoths of the industry have way too much bureaucracy to do in such a short time."

Good for Silver Creek, who could teach the big boys other lessons as well. The Hardwood Solitaire series is brilliant because it understands how and why people play such a game. The lush graphics, medieval stylings, and soothing harpsichord soundtracks are deliberately therapeutic, a clever nod to the zen state a simple game of solitaire evokes.

And The Boss could use a bit of Hardwood Solitaire zen right now. It calms the nerves after those nightmares involving Charo backstage at a USO show...wielding a giant guitar...wailing "Cootchie, Cootchie this!"

Contact: Jonas Stewart, pr@silvercrk.com

[Copyright 2003 PBI Media, LLC. All rights reserved.]